Friday, December 12, 2014

Review: Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Two
years ago the first Hobbit movie turned
out to be a crushing disappointment. No one expected Peter Jackson to deliver
something so lukewarm and bloated, and it was clear that cramming in three
movies was never going to be the best solution for quality control. The second
movie was a minor improvement, because it cut down the running time and Smaug
was truly a visual and aural spectacle. It still wasn’t overall a very good
movie though. The Hobbit: The Battle of
the Five Armies is the best of the three prequels, but that’s not saying
much. And it probably feels like a better film mostly because the expectations
from this movie were very low.

Five Armies picks up immediately where
the previous movie left off – Smaug (once again voiced by Cumberbatch’s most excellent
vocal cords), pissed off by the presence of Bilbo and the dwarves sets off to
destroy Lake Town. Back in the Lonely Mountain Thorin, the leader of the group
is seduced by the gigantic reserves of gold and the Arkenstone in Erebor.

It
seems like the perfect setup for a huge finale – the problem is, it’s all very
anti climactic. Smaug gets killed too fast. It’s quite frustrating, because
we’ve been teased with Smaug’s buildup for two whole movies and he’s put down
in a matter of ten minutes in this movie. The focus jarringly shifts to the
Elves and the humans joining hands to attack Erebor, because Thorin refuses to
give them their share of the gold. Thorin in retaliation calls a cousin and his
whole army of dwarves to fight against the Elves and the men. Meanwhile Azog
rounds up a huge army of his Orcs to attack everyone, making Erebor seem like a
mixer grinder. It’s all supposed to be epic, and many of the ‘attack’ moments
are quite rousing, but they all end in cringe inducingly limp ways. A few new
creatures are briefly shown, and suddenly disappear. The Orcs organize an army
of bats in various buildup scenes, and they’re taken care of off screen. It’s
strange and it feels like Jackson had a lot of will power at the beginning and
suddenly lost all interest in making the film.

The
problems from the previous two films carry over to an even higher extent in the
third film. None of those seven (or was it eight or nine) dwarves have any
distinct personality, it’s impossible to distinguish who’s who, and when
something bad happens to them you just can’t care. Combine that with a horrible
love story between one of the dwarves and the Elf Tauriel and you have a
melodramatic disaster on your hands. The trilogy’s core problem has always been
the underwritten dwarves, and Jackson’s choice to constantly bring in characters,
settings and the nostalgia from the previous trilogy than to make a new world here.
LOTR worked because of its unforgettable characters, and it’s the opposite here.
We knew in The Fellowship of the Ring
itself that the dwarves ended up dead in the mines of Moria. Imagine how
terrific this trilogy would have been had Jackson focused on the story of these
dwarves rather than use them as placeholders to showcase the same people from
the previous movies.

It’s
also unclear as to whose eyes the Hobbit films are being told from. The film is
called The Hobbit but it’s not about him. On one hand there’s Bilbo who is
supposed to anchor the films but he’s shoved aside to bring in an LOTR element
just when he gets interesting. The POV of the dwarves is nonexistent because
they hardly matter. Plus there’s Gandalf doing his own thing, and the Elves too,
and the humans as well, none of which is explored well enough to have any
significant impact. They all just go through the motions in their green screen
boxes, participating in the same narrative they did twelve years ago.

The
only thing more frustrating than Jackson’s choice of telling a similar story
again, is by telling it with a ton of fake looking CGI. It’s hands down, the
biggest, most annoying element of these films. It’s been twelve years since the
last LOTR movie and the visuals in those films look more real, more immersive
than any of these films that have a threefold budget. What does work in this
movie is the wonderful Martin Freeman, only because he’s the only one in the
movie who seems to be in it for the story, not for the cash grab.

Gaffes
aside, The Battle of the Five Armies
is a harmless action movie. It’s fun in a few places and does a lot of fan
service for those who’ve read the books. It’s just forgettable, but certainly
unavoidable for those who’ve seen the previous five movies. Jackson treats this
property as his precious, let’s just hope someone takes away the ring from him
and he gets back in form with Tintin 2.